‘Electricity superhighway’ puts Bam top of monthly contracts table

Royal Bam topped the monthly contractors’ league table in July for the first time since 2020, after it was chosen to build converter stations at each end of a £2bn undersea cable between Scotland and England.

The firm was awarded £500m for its share of work on Eastern Green Link 2 (EGL2, pictured), which is projected to be the UK’s largest-ever electricity-transmission scheme. It also picked up three building contracts, including an £80m school in Dunfermline.

Although Bam has featured in the top 10 for the past three months (finishing eighth in June), the firm has not topped the league since September 2020, when it secured big contracts for Sky’s Elstree site in Hertfordshire and the Coop Live arena in Manchester.

Hitachi Energy is the other preferred supplier on the EGL2 project, with a £500m stake that propelled the energy firm to second on the table.

Last month’s champion, Galliford Try, dropped 13 places, although it secured a £72m office-refurbishment job at Adelaide House in London Bridge.

CityFibre entered the monthly league table for the first time, in third place, as the result of three new contracts worth £435m under the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology’s Project Gigabit programme. The broadband provider will connect 218,000 hard-to-reach homes and businesses in rural Norfolk, Suffolk and Hampshire with full fibre.

Morgan Sindall dropped one place, from third to fourth, but won the most contracts during the month, with 39 deals worth a combined £218.9m. These included a £25m NHS diagnostic centre in Norfolk.

Another big award during the month was a £219m Ministry of Defence design-and-build contract for a new building at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, shared by Skanska and Black & Veatch.

Meanwhile, six new contracts were enough to keep Kier at the top of the rolling 12-month league table, having been awarded 150 contracts worth £2.57bn since August 2022.

Despite its high volume of awards in July, Morgan Sindall slipped down a place to third, while Bam’s bumper month pushed it up from eighth to fifth place.